In less than a week, we lost two fine athletes and broadcasters that I loved to listen to. First, we lost local Chicago favorite Ron Santo. Santo was a Cub for all but 117 games in his career, but is better known as the radio voice of the team. In that role, he was hilarious, […]

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I don’t watch very much television, and certainly no network nighttime programming. (My television viewing consists of sports when I can wrestle the remote away from the kids. I have seen more of Dora The Explorer and Pixar movies than anyone my age should.) As such, I avoided the “Desperate Housewives” phenomenon from a couple […]

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I am a fan of Elvis Costello and of T-Bone Burnett. I have just about every release Mr. Costello has done including his orchestral material; and I have a good amount of Mr. Burnett’s output as well. As a longtime fan, I know that Costello is not a bandwagon jumper; he has worked with Burnett […]

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As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, this past trip was my 10th TIFF (in 12 years – I didn’t go in 2000 or 2001). It’s all The Indignant Wife’s fault, our first year together, she had me come up to the festival, a ritual that she and her friends had enjoyed for years […]

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Since I am a collector, it was easy to come up with the list of the best films I’ve seen at the festival, I just looked at my DVD list and sorted it by the films I’ve seen in Toronto. For the most part, I’ve seen many more good films than bad at TIFF, but […]

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I always try to choose at least one documentary at the festival each year. I live documentaries because they bring out a person, or a time, or an true event into sharper focus. Yes, they often have a point of view and most are relatively liberal in political slant, but so am I, so it […]

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As I’ve written above, I’ve seen far more good movies than bad ones at the Toronto International Film Festival. For one thing, most Hollywood dreck – stupid “rom coms,” sick comedies, inane films, don’t get shown in Toronto. Unfortunately, this is not to say that there aren’t some stinkers that we had to sit through. […]

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